


Carapace

by Fontainebleau



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: How It Began, M/M, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 14:06:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8330662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: How Billy found his way there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfic: be gentle with me.

_Build a hard shell_ , life’s taught him. _Keep what you feel locked down inside: show a smooth, hard surface to the world. Don’t count on anyone else – people vanish, promises turn to ash. However much you might want a light to go home to at the end of the day, nothing in this new-made country is stable. Nothing lasts. Sex can be bought and sold, but love? Lock that need away_. This is a man’s world and they’re always alert for the first sign of weakness, a crack in the shell that they can needle at, jeer at, exploit. It’s a struggle at first for the boy who calls himself Billy Rocks, to show the impassive oriental face people expect, to keep his words few and tight, to do his speaking with his knives, to ask for nothing and to move on. _Like the turtle in the river, hard shell._

_Believe it. Become it. Billy Rocks, knifeman. Billy Rocks, hard-eyed quick-draw artist. Billy Rocks, all grace and muscle and black gloves, spinning his knives and staring them down, making men afraid. Feeling the rightness of the heft and throw, blades dancing like flickering fish. He loves it. He loves the power, the respect; he loves the look on a man’s face when his draw stutters and he finds himself looking down a gun barrel; he loves the failure he can read in slumped shoulders and bowed heads. It’s hard-won, and he loves it._

***

Goodnight Robicheaux shocks him at first. To Billy he seems to be all outside. He’s so talkative, a tale for every occasion, so sociable, making friends everywhere with his easy charm. Yet looking closely, underneath, Billy sees, there’s the same watchfulness, the same care: show the world what it wants to see. Goodnight Robicheaux, crack shot, Southern gentleman, man of stature and reputation on this dangerous frontier. Talk is Goodnight’s armour as silence is his own. So when Goodnight offers that they ride together, so he can smooth Billy’s path through the white man’s world and they can both make a living, well, why not?

And it works: he fights, he wins, and if white men don’t like it, now there’s Goodnight to head off the trouble with a hand on the shoulder and a flourish of his name. The money’s in the hat and they pass from town to town, and it works. They find a rhythm to their days over the first weeks, and to the evenings, cooking, smoking, Goodnight’s stories, stretching his legs out by the fire, _Did I ever tell you about the time_ …? But the first time that Billy jumps awake to Goodnight’s thrashing and strangled cries, when he sees the terror and pain of the nightmare, clear and raw,  when he holds his new friend and soothes his fear, _is that the first crack in his armour?_ As Goodnight quiets into uneasy sleep, Billy fetches his blanket and lies down beside him, back to back. _Might help_ , he reckons, and if the warmth of another body is welcome to him, well, is that something to dwell on?

In the morning Goodnight, clearly awkward, begins his halting explanation, but Billy stops him. ‘It’s OK,’ he says, ‘we all have demons’. And after that, though they start the night on opposite sides of the fire, often Billy finds himself beside Goodnight at dawn. The comfort of his sleeping body begins to seen familiar, even expected.

***

In Oneida he finds a Little China, and as he drifts round the market, old words rattling and slotting in his head, food sparking memories on his tongue, the idea of balm for the dreams occurs to him. Opium had been a friend to the trackside workers, and it isn’t hard to find if you know words to say. That evening in their room, Billy lights a cigarette, inhales slowly, then holds it out to Goodnight across the gap between their beds. ‘For the demons’, he explains, and Goodnight, a familiar haunted expression ghosting across his face, draws on it experimentally. ‘Little at a time,’ warns Billy, reaching out to take it back, and they trade the cigarette back and forth as a warm haze settles between them. The smoke twines and rises; _did it wind its way unseen into the cracks?_

This too becomes part of their evening routine, and Goodnight seems the easier for it, though Billy is never sorry when the beginnings of a nightmare save him from sleeping alone. The drug makes the evenings slower, the stories longer and as they lie shoulder to shoulder, sharing the smoke, Goodnight began to speak of his childhood, the time before the war consumed him, what he had hoped to do and become, and Billy answers, little by little, telling what he remembers of his boyhood, the family he’s all but forgotten and the father he lost. He doesn’t talk about the after time, _the hunger and the desperation and the shame_ , but he circles closer to it, and Goodnight listens and murmurs and never mentions a word outside of the haze and the campfire and the dark.

So the night that Goodnight turns as Billy takes the cigarette from his fingers and leans in to kiss him, dreamlike and slow, it doesn’t seem a strange thing or a surprise, just another part of this enfolding lazy warmth. Still, Billy fully expects to see the shame he reads in his friend’s averted face come morning, Goodnight unwilling to meet his eye, breaking camp and saddling up with grim concentration as though this will be the last time. _How can he find it so easy to mend with a wink and a twitch of an eyebrow? Where is the inscrutable mask he’s worn for so long?_ Goodnight’s sudden smile is reward enough, and the next night it comes easy to throw the stub into the fire and turn to him, opening up to his warm wet mouth, feeling rifle-calloused fingers on his cheekbone, hands running through his hair. There’s sex in it too, of course there is, hands on belt buckles, unbuttoning, touching and sliding, slow and dreamy at first, then faster and harder until sparks flare behind closed eyelids, but that isn’t the point. That you can get for fifty cents in any crib, or, in the dark of a railroad camp, for considerably less; you take it or you give it and you leave and you show no feelings. _Hard shell_. _When had he last felt this? When had he laid himself open to the kisses along his throat, the hand on his back, the breath of his name on another’s lips? Not bought, but given, as long and as warm as the desert night._

***

 _But where does this road lead? He knows, he’s learnt. Show them that you care and see it become a weapon against you. Show her what you want and watch her use it as bait. Tell him your dreams and listen to him laugh._ Goodnight shows him his weakness, his fear and loss, the despair of a life ill-lived, and Billy is terrified by the man’s strength. It’s an exposure more shocking than nakedness, to reveal his flinching inner being without thought of the consequences. _Believe it. Become it._ _What am I, without my armour? What’s a turtle without its shell?_

***

They’re in a competition, and it’s rapidly heading south. In a small town like this most come just for entertainment, glad to find some novelty, happy to set themselves up shooting targets against the legendary Goodnight Robicheaux, betting and joshing, pushing a cousin or brother who fancies his draw or his punch for a turn in the ring. Goodnight is playing the crowd and Billy’s been winning, faking out and then winning again, and the money’s flowing smoothly and it’s all good-natured, until a mouthy drunk starts sounding off about Celestials and their underhand foreign tricks, can’t be trusted, everybody knows. Billy reaches for his emotionless stare, but the mouthy drunk’s got two friends, a fat one who looks good with his fists and a skinny one who looks mean, and they’re not succumbing to Goodnight’s charm. They want to take him on, two against one, and Goodnight, he knows, is fixing to walk them away from it, but Billy wants this, _he wants to put the fear in their dumbfuck faces, he wants to humiliate them, he wants the control and the power_. So he says yes, two on one, take the bet, and Goodnight doesn’t like it but he’s not the one walking into the ring ( _I can do this, Goody, I am this_ ) and there’s a ragged cheer as he takes his stance ( _dumbfucks_ ) and then there’s the zip and crackle along every nerve in the timeless stretching wait, until his muscles move without thought as he steps through the dance and the third one comes in, like he was always going to, and Billy is exploding with fists and feet, spinning like one of his silver knives and they’re so slow and he’s so fast and then it’s all over and he’s Billy Rocks and they’re shouting and he won’t even crack a smile for them.

But then there’s Goodnight, Goodnight with his Southern gentleman cravat and his coat full of dollars, and his face isn’t awe or even pride, it’s relief, he’s bubbling into laughter as they walk away, ‘Did you see the crowd, their jaws were sagging, you must have broken every goddamn rib in that skinny one’s chest…’ and Billy’s snorting too, it takes hold of them and they have to duck around a corner into a feedlot before they crease up in the street with laughter. Goodnight’s got his hands on his knees, breathless from laughing, ‘When you kicked the fat one in his face, the other two were like to wet their pants…’, and the lift of it, the joy of it, fills him up, the sparkling moment carries him as he puts his hands on Goodnight’s shoulders and backs him up against the dark plank wall. Pinning his arms, pressing his body against him, he kisses Goodnight hard and deep, and with a strangled ‘Lord, Billy’, Goodnight kisses back, tangle of tongue and teeth, hot and wet, and it isn’t lazy or slow or _other_ , it’s real and it’s now and it’s in broad daylight. Billy works his thigh between Goodnight’s legs and grinds against him, hearing him gasp, feeling hands grip his neck and his ass. He licks down to Goodnight’s collarbone, pulls up to kiss him again, then presses his face close as the words speak themselves, ‘I want you, Goody. I want to fuck you. I’ve never wanted anything more.’ It’s quick, the first time, how could it not be, but it’s different and right, stripping their clothes to lick and clutch, fingers digging into muscle, tasting Goody’s cock, the heat and heft of it, feeling the scald of his mouth on his own, crashing together spit-slicked and raw and urgent, until he rides the wave and the light spins shattering like one of his own knives.

***

When his head clears, Billy is lying in the hazy light of the feedbarn, Goody a weight across his chest pressing him down into a bed of hay. A hand brushes a loose strand of hair from his face, and Goodnight murmurs low, ‘In a barn, _chéri_? It’s not quite what I had in mind.’ Billy can’t stop smiling. ‘You had it in mind?’ Goody’s face is close. ‘Well hell, Billy… seems like I wasn’t the only one with ideas’. And Billy is amazed, really amazed, by what he’s done and how he feels, how he’s found his answer right there in front of him. _Turtle doesn’t grow a shell to trap itself, and it doesn’t try to fight free. A shell’s a place to hide, but not only that, not if there’s a way in for someone to find. It’s a shelter. It’s a home._

They stroll out of the barn like two men who’ve gone to dicker over some feed and been disappointed, and Goodnight bends to pick up Billy’s hat where it lies abandoned in the dust, brushes it off and hands it to him. ‘We should celebrate. Some decent food, some good brandy if there's such a thing to be found in an ass-end town like this, and a room. With a door.’ And Billy gives him the Billy Rocks expressionless stare and says, ‘And some oil. For your rifle.’  Just so he can see the look on Goodnight’s face.


End file.
